Traces the development of moral philosophy from the Homeric age to the present day
Includes bibliographical references
The philosophical point of the history of ethics -- The prephilosophical history of "good" and the transition to philosophy -- The Sophists and Socrates -- Plato : The Gorgias -- Plato : the Republic -- Postscript to Plato -- Aristotle's Ethics -- Postscript to Greek ethics -- Christianity -- Luther, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza -- New values -- The British eighteenth-century argument -- The French eighteenth-century argument -- Kant -- Hegel and Marx -- Kierkegaard to Nietzsche -- Reformers, utilitarians, idealists -- Modern moral philosophy